Venue pulls plug on XO Music Festival in East Bay

1of 3Ludacris was supposed to be one of the headliners at the XO Festival in Antioch this weekend.Photo: Ser Baffo / Getty Images for BET

2of 3Recording artist Mistah F.A.B. was supposed to be one of the headliners at the XO Festival in Antioch this weekend.Photo: Thearon W. Henderson / BIG3/Getty Images

3of 3T.I. was supposed to be one of the headliners at the XO Festival in Antioch this weekend.Photo: Willy Sanjuan, Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP

Officials at the Contra Costa Event Park on Wednesday pulled the plug on a three-day concert called the XO Music Festival amid controversy about the event’s legitimacy just days before the festival was to be held in Antioch, but organizers seem determined to bring the new event to the Bay Area.

In a statement, Contra Costa Event Park CEO Joe Brengle claimed the XO Music Festival’s promoters did not fulfill “contractual obligations,” despite paying $27,000 to rent the facility. In their own statement, festival organizers cited poor ticket sales and “negative media reports” for the cancellation of the event, which was scheduled to begin Friday.

“Today we are deeply disappointed to have to announce that due to lower than anticipated ticket sales and in part due to the fact that there were some negative media reports targeting us, with which we strongly disagree, the XO Music Festival scheduled to occur on July 13 will be postponed to another time to be announced at a future date,” read the festival’s statement on its website.

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Brengle contends that “in the best interest and safety of our facility, event attendees and the City of Antioch have no choice but to cancel the XO Music Festival,” in a statement also released Wednesday morning.

In the middle of all this: the ticket holders who paid between $375 and $2,495 for a festival experience that boasted carnival rides, comedy and culinary stages, and three days of music. Performers on the bill included rappers Ludacris, T.I. and the Bay Area’s Mistah F.A.B.

Brengle directed refund inquiries to the XO Music Festival promoter, World Class Entertainment’s Sami Habib, a.k.a. Habibullah Said Qadir. In February, Habib was arrested and charged with more than 40 felonies as part of an alleged real estate scam involving high-end properties in Fremont.

Brengle as well as representatives from the XO Music Festival did not return calls and emails from The Chronicle for further comment.

GrowTix, which handled tickets for the event, said in a statement: “We are refunding all ticket holders immediately. This process has already started. Funds were never distributed to the XO festival and held by us in case of cancellation.”

There were signs of trouble from the start. Using art appropriated from other events and stock images, the festival website promised more than 100 music acts performing across seven stages, plus appearances by the cast of “Jersey Shore,” all in an “ultra VIP” setting. The bill for the first-time event quickly prompted skeptics to dub XO Music Festival as the Bay Area’s Fyre Festival, a comparison to the “luxury festival” disaster last year on a Bahamian island co-organized by rapper Ja Rule.

Bob Rosenberg of the band Will to Power, which pulled out of the lineup after the promoters failed to send contracts and deposits, said in a Facebook post, “I saw red flags when my tour manager first told me about it. … The only info I could find on the internet was the XO website which sounded like Fyre Fest.”

Alex Scammon, manager of the band the Big Fit, said that the festival organizers just last week approached him and his partner to provide sound and lighting for the entire event via the talent-for-hire site GigSalad.

“It’s usually used for local acts and wedding bands, so it was very unusual to see something like that come across there,” he said.

According to XO Music Festival’s statement, “employees and agents have worked extremely hard to book artists, promote the festival, create marketing materials, secure vendors and otherwise do the things that are needed to put on a festival of this magnitude” for months. However, while other large-scale Bay Area music festivals such as Outside Lands and BottleRock Napa Valley take weeks to set up, there was no activity at the Contra Costa Event Park site on Tuesday.

Aidin Vaziri covers pop music for the San Francisco Chronicle. Along with his off-the-cuff interviews for the weekly Pop Quiz column, he spends most days shuffling through stacks of new releases and nights at Bay Area concert venues, big and small. He also reports on emerging trends and technologies in the industry. He maintains the popular Loaded music blog on SFGate.com and regularly contributes to the Style section.